


They Made it to the Moon

by cicak



Category: Layton Kyouju Series | Professor Layton Series
Genre: Forgiveness, M/M, puzzle
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-30
Updated: 2011-01-30
Packaged: 2017-10-15 05:54:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 902
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/157698
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Forgiveness is a complicated thing</p>
            </blockquote>





	They Made it to the Moon

When Clive is released from prison it’s ten long years later and he doesn’t need the fiction of being an older version of anyone else anymore.

The London he’s released into is different in every single subtle way to how he imagined the future; from the smell to the increased traffic to the fashion all the normal people are wearing. He takes a room in a shabby house, buys nothing but a stack of paper and a new pen, and waits for his nerve to catch up with him.

Clive begins each letter with an inkblot, hesitating over the very first word and all the subsequent ones. When he finally decides on his wording he has to copy it all out again so as to make it legible, but when he drops the letter into the post box his heart is lighter than it has been in a while.

Layton looks the same as he did, as if the ten years never happened and Clive is pretending again to be Luke to complete a half-hearted megalomania. When Layton ushers Clive in it is with a civil formality that while not frosty or impolite is still unpleasant. They have tea, anyway, or a polite fiction of such; Layton has some fine cake he cuts a generous slice of, and they have a pleasant conversation about nothing at all. Luke is at university, now, he finds out, and evidently thriving. He wants to be an academic or a policeman, but he has yet to decide. They don’t speak of what happened to the other London, of the subterfuge or the death and destruction Clive caused, but by the end it’s not as big an elephant in the room as he had feared.

When Clive goes to leave, Layton gives him a smile that reveals the fine lines that now crease his eyes. Clive feels a ping of satisfaction at seeing them, the kind you get after slotting the first piece of a puzzle into place.

A few days later Clive gets a call from Layton asking him if he would like to attend a lecture at the university a colleague of his is giving. Clive goes, listens rapturous to a talk on a new hoard of Saxon silver that even in the photographs is resplendent and when the professor asks if Layton and his friend would like to come see the hoard some time, Layton smiles enough for both of them.

Clive still has a small part of his inheritance remaining, even after spending it all on his wood-for-the-trees plan, but it is fast running out. He writes a few things and scrapes a bit of a living where he can. Six months after he gets out of prison, Layton asks him to come and be a fresh set of eyes on an investigation he has been stymied by. They work tirelessly to solve a strange locked-door kidnapping of a society matron’s prized poodle, and it is Clive who realises the final piece of the puzzle is in the suspicious activity of the lady’s second husband and his mysterious landlocked yacht. After that, Clive always has a place on Layton’s investigations as they forge a fresh partnership across the new terrain of London.

It is Layton who kisses him four months later over the fine single malt a client left them as a token of appreciation at finding his daughter. Clive doesn’t drink often, so maybe he’s more affected by it than he would be, but he feels quite in possession of his faculties as he watches Layton remove his hat, strangely vulnerable without it, and Clive allows himself to card his fingers through Layton’s hair, hidden secret of brown now touched by silver, and as they kiss hungrily he feels Layton stroke a lush curve down the line of his spine, tracing solutions to nothing into the skin of the small of his back.

Layton is a gentleman and Clive is reformed, but all told Clive is desperate for it and can feel Layton’s anticipation and tension as he falls to his knees and yanks Layton’s belt open and out of the loops to get his hand on soft hidden skin and his mouth full and lets himself get lost in the taste and feel of the Professor coaxing him through it, strong hands on his jaw and the back of his head.

He never calls him Professor, as that would be a line that would maybe go past the tentative forgiveness he’s earned for himself. Layton takes him to bed, lays him out and teases him to the edge before he buries his head into Clive’s shoulder and takes him punishingly hard, so hard that the bed rattles like it’s collapsing and Clive finds himself screaming in release as it overwhelms him completely, feeling Layton completely let his gentlemanly reserve go in favour of a harsher nature, biting the crook of Clive’s neck as he comes, the marks matching the ten perfect half moons Clive’s left in his shoulders in return.

Over time Layton becomes Hershel and even the honorific loses its lurking stigma. When in the summer Luke comes to visit, tall and blond and utterly unlike Clive in every way after all, he barely bats an eye at their obvious domesticity and smiles broadly in his own forgiveness, and Clive feels the last piece of the puzzle slide into place.


End file.
